25 Years Later, Would The Public Have Loved Them?

February 24, 1999|By Bob Greene.

Boy, were Haldeman and Ehrlichman ever born too soon.

That was the first thought to come to mind upon the death of John D. Ehrlichman last week. Ehrlichman died at the age of 73 in his Atlanta home; his fellow top adviser in the White House of Richard Nixon, H.R. Haldeman, died in 1993 at the age of 67. When they worked together for Nixon, they were the two most feared political operatives in the country; their fierce and unyielding reputations made people tremble in their presence. The so-called "Berlin Wall" they constructed around Nixon meant that no one got access to the president without going through the unsmiling Haldeman and Ehrlichman first.

Each did time in federal prison after being convicted in the Watergate cover-up; Haldeman and Ehrlichman were never again major figures on the national political scene after being released.

Born too soon.

Because--in this cable-ready era of ours--Haldeman and Ehrlichman would have been able to come out of prison and ascend to the greatest political stardom television has to offer. They could have written their own tickets--the competing cable news networks would have been slobbering all over their corporate checkbooks to sign those two up.

Their failing--beside being born a decade or two too early--was that, somewhere inside, they apparently felt some twinge of shame.

An outmoded concept in our shameless new age.

Oh, it's not that they disappeared completely. Haldeman and Ehrlichman both did some writing. Haldeman invested in hotels and restaurants, and then became the vice president of a real estate company; Ehrlichman became an executive with an environmental consulting firm.

But neither man-- in the days before cable reconfigured the groundrules of the political landscape-- went out and took full advantage of their most valuable assets: the ruthless reputations they earned in the White House. It was as if on some level they sensed that, having served a president who was forced to resign, having done prison time, they had given up the right to speak regularly to the nation with authority and confidence.

Blown opportunity.

Because when you look at the politics-to-punditry continuum these days--a path littered with the likes of John Sununu and George Stephanopoulos and Dick Morris and Pat Buchanan--you realize that Haldeman and Ehrlichman could have trumped them all. If you think James Carville and Mary Matalin have hit upon a cynically lucrative gimmick--married couple, alleged political adversaries, co-stars in cloying product commercials--consider the options Haldeman and Ehrlichman would have had.

They could have faked a feud, and squared off as contentious hosts of their own cable shoutfest. Or they could have teamed up against liberals assigned to play telepolitical Washington Generals to Haldeman and Ehrlichman's Harlem Globetrotters, destined always to be the victors at the end of their show. Prison time? The country not only would have forgiven--the prison time would have made Haldeman and Ehrlichman even more luminous properties, would have strengthened their resumes.

All they would have needed to do is wink. That's the requirement these days--if the political hardliners hint to their TV audiences that it's really all a joke, just a game that all of us are in on, then their prospects are limitless. It's a relatively new phenomenon-- and those who are adept can sit before the cameras and watch their bank accounts grow and grow. Haldeman and Ehrlichman could have developed crusty cable personas that doubled as platinum-plated annuities. What business group wouldn't want to hire them as speakers--especially after watching them on TV every night of the week?

It didn't happen--Haldeman and Ehrlichman dropped out of the most intense glare of the media spotlight because . . .

Well, because they didn't get the joke. They didn't even comprehend that it was a joke. Those guys, no matter what you thought of them, actually believed in what they said they believed in. That act of theirs in the Nixon White House? Evidently it wasn't an act--that was really them.

In 1999, maybe they would have been clever enough to package it, soften it, become a part of the media instead of a target of the media. They never understood the requisite twinkle.